Percolator, Dremel and Pregel – Google’s new data-crunching ecosystem

Hadoop traces its origins to Google where two early projects GFS (Google File System) and GMR (Google Map Reduce) were written besides Big Table, to manage large volumes of data. These systems are great at crunching large volumes of data in a distributed computing environment (with commodity servers) in batch mode. Any changes to the data requires streaming over the entire data-set and thus big latency. So it is good for “Data in Rest” or static data.

Now Google finds itself limited by its own invention of GFS/GMR/BigTable. Hence they have been working on the post-Hadoop set of data crunching tools – Percolator, Dremel, and Pregel. Here is a brief narration of each of these tools.

Percolatoris a system for incrementally processing updates to a large data set. By replacing a batch-based indexing system with one on incremental processing with Percolator, you significantly speed up the process and reduce…